[rektide]

James is one of the world's great techno-adventurers, & getting to para-socially share in wild adventures like this makes living on Spaceship Earth more lovely & lively! James has also done cool projects like sweet.js macros, helped kick off Firefox devtool's transition to react (iirc), oh and lead the basically industry standard JS formatter Priettier project. I'm forgetting a dozen other things over the years but it's always been fun.

Just a heads-up, the File System Access API[1] is underway in Chrome, which potentially removes nearly all of the absurdity here. It has other benefits too. A web page using this could write a .sql file on to your drive, that other programs could then access. One of the other bright stars in my world is Karli Koss, who has an extensive personal data-extraction setup for a ridiculously colossal variety of services & devices[2]. A vast amount of this massive massive data-gathering framework is just reading sqlite databases of the various devices and apps. If the web can help participate more actively, can let apps write sql files to store state: so much the better I say. Help externalize your state beyond the browser, please!

[1] https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/#api-filesystemwri... https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html

[shekhirin]

Several months ago I've made a proof-of-concept of exactly what you're talking about, feel free to check it out: https://shekhirin.com/sqlite-fs/.

I recommend downloading sample DB, writing some dummy query like "SELECT BILLINGCOUNTRY, COUNT(INVOICEID) FROM INVOICE GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC" and then pressing Execute.

I've been planning to write an extensive article about it and open sourcing the solution cleaning up the code a little bit, but still haven't got much time to do so.

[rektide]

now let's see what it takes to make absurd-fs, where we use https://github.com/guardianproject/libsqlfs to make a filesystem on top of sqlite on top of the File System Access API.

gotta keep ourselves fully looped! ⥀

(is there perchance a repo available with your work? that'd be lovely to see.)

[dmitriid]

> Just a heads-up, the File System Access API is underway in Chrome, which potentially removes nearly all of the absurdity here.

It doesn't. Because there are now 4 different file access api proposals. At least one of them is already in Chrome (File System Access). [1]

Both Safari and Mozilla are unwilling to implement any of the four until the mess is cleaned up, and there's a single coherent proposal.

Chrome, of course, doesn't care. Storage Foundation API in addition to File System Access they already implemented.

[1] https://github.com/WICG/storage-foundation-api-explainer/iss...

[x0x0]

This is amazing. Thanks for sharing the link to karlicoss' site.

[outworlder]

I remember him from the Gambit Scheme days.

https://archive.jlongster.com/Open-Sourcing-My-Gambit-Scheme...

[jlongster]

Thank you!